THE SENSE OF THE INFINITE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. It may, perhaps, be appropriate, before going on to discuss the proper subject of this book, to lay out as carefully as possible a clear and definite line along which the discussion is to move; to state, that is, not merely what the author proposes to do, but likewise what he does not propose to do. In the first place, no attempt has been made to discuss the sense of the Infinite from the standpoint of a philosopher, theologian or psychologist; still less, from the scientific standpoint of certain recent investigators to whom all mental and spiritual phenomena are purely physical or pathological in their origin. But the subject has been approached rather from a combined literary and personal point of view. A lover of literature from boyhood up, there has grown up within the writer an everdeepening sense of the essential unity of the experience which has led to the production of all the highest forms of poetry and art, and which likewise lies at the base of all personal religion, whether it be found in the humbler walks of life, or on the shining heights of spiritual exaltation, where dwell the saints and prophets of all time. Books, and even quotations, which in early life had seemed beautiful, have revealed, as the years have gone on, a deeper and profounder truth; and he has come to see that men so varying in their intellectual and moral character as Plato and Goethe, Dante and Wordsworth, St. Francis and Thoreau, had at bottom the same experience in their moods of high enthusiasm. Following humbly in the footsteps of these great masters the writer has had a vague conception, from time to time, of what that experience really is; has seen amid the darkness and perplexity of so much of our modern civilization, the sunny roofs and shining towers of that celestial city, which ever has been and ever will be the goal of the longing souls of those who, disheartened by the sordidness and imperfection of the natural world, seek comfort and peace in the thought of an Ideal World. It was the intellectual conception, then, of the essential unity of the transcendental element lying at the heart of art, literature and religion, together with a personal experience, sane and normal, it is hoped, of what this sense is, due to long and reverent study of "the noble living and the noble dead," that has led to the writing of this book. In it an effort has been made to keep clear of the vast jungle of Oriental Mysticism, Sufism, Babism, Buddhism and its modern representative Theosophy-all of which, although often full of beauty and fascination, are yet in their fatalism and utter negation of the active life, repugnant to the normal Occidental mind. |